Conventionally, in the computer-related arts, a network is an arrangement of physical computer systems configured to communicate with each other. Network traffic is transmitted over the network from a sending computer system, via a network interface, to a receiving computer system via a second network interface.
Typically, network traffic is transmitted in the form of packets, where each packet includes a header and a payload. The header contains information regarding the source address, destination address, size, transport protocol used to transmit the packet, and various other identification information associated with the packet. The payload contains the actual data to be transmitted from the network to the receiving system.